My IRC client does not support SSL, so I was wondering if there was any other way to encrypt the information between SSL clients on an IRC network, maybe by using SSH to enter the IRC program or something (it's a command-line program) and passing all the plain-text through SSH first. I tried stunnel but for the love of my life could not get it to work. I used the default conf in /etc/stunnel/ and commented out the key line towards the beginning since it's optional as a client. Then I generated the certificate or whatever with the script that was in /etc/stunnel/ and that worked fine. Next I did:

It ran without any errors or warnings, and so I fired up my IRC client, then I tried to connect to the server (irc.server.net for this example), port 6697 and the connection was refused
I want to chat with everyone else with SSL! Please help me

I don't like any other client I've tried. Maybe it's just a mental aspect, but nonetheless I like this one.

So then this made me think: if I don't like everything else, maybe I can just learn programming and try to code in the SSL protocol by myself into the client...that'd take a few years for me to learn and perfect the code, but it'd be a good learning experience.